My Banner Is Up

     Last winter I spent months painting a picture of McBride’s Horse Rescue that was one of several paintings that were to be made into banners that would adorn the light posts along Main Street.  I was informed the other day that the banners were now hung and I was anxious to see how mine looked.  I was going to take photos of all of the banners, but when I went to take the photo of mine that the powerful rain squall took place so I quickly took a photo of mine and scrambled back to our car.

    Painting this picture was a memorable experience.  Here is what I wrote about the ordeal:

When asked to do a street banner on the subject of the McBride Horse Rescue , I was full of apprehension.  Although I had been painting almost daily since 2005, my realistic paintings were always based on my own photos, and I didn’t have any photos of the horse rescue. 

I was concerned with the vertical shape of the banner.  Composition is very important and having to come up with a painting showing the horse rescue on a two foot by four feet canvas seemed problematic.  In photos of the rescue, the brightness of the snow, made the rescuers and horses very dark and difficult to distinguish, so I used Photoshop to brighten the colors of clothes, and to highlight part of the horses by dabbling some sunshine on their backs, so from a distance they would look more distinct.   I also added that last rescuer from another photo.

When I paint I divide the canvas into two inch squares; painting one square at a time.  I paint with the canvas on my lap, looking at the square I am painting; enlarged on my computer monitor.  I couldn't paint a vertical four foot high canvas on my lap, so I painted the whole thing sideways on my lap, looking at the square on the computer that I had also flipped sideways.

My two foot by four foot canvas contained 288 two inch squares.  The picture took me 188 hours to paint.   I am not used to painting people's faces and found painting those squares terrifying, and I got really tired of painting all of those manys squares of snow.

You can view my other paintings by going to:  davidmarchant2.ca